Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite solar cells are attracting much attention due to their excellent photovoltaic properties. In these multilayered structures, the device performance is determined by complicated carrier dynamics. Here, we studied photocarrier recombination and injection dynamics in CHNHPbI perovskite solar cells using time-resolved photoluminescence (PL) and photocurrent (PC) measurements. It is found that a peculiar slowdown in the PL decay time constants of the perovskite layer occurs for higher excitation powers, followed by a decrease of the external quantum efficiency for PC. This indicates that a carrier-injection bottleneck exists at the heterojunction interfaces, which limits the photovoltaic performance of the device in concentrator applications. We conclude that the carrier-injection rate is sensitive to the photogenerated carrier density, and the carrier-injection bottleneck strongly enhances recombination losses of photocarriers in the perovskite layer at high excitation conditions. The physical origin of the bottleneck is discussed based on the result of numerical simulations.

The mechanisms of upconverted photocurrent in InAs quantum structures embedded in Al x Ga 1−x As were studied with simultaneous measurements of photoluminescence and photocurrent spectra. Efficient upconversion was verified in samples with and without quantum dots. The dominant upconversion process from low temperatures to room temperature was found to occur through an Auger process in disklike InAs quantum structures. The results suggest the importance of shallow energy levels, which enable upconversion and efficient carrier extraction through multiparticle interactions. The disklike structure was concluded to be a suitable intermediate-band structure in terms of the energy conversion efficiency.

We report on the upconversion of infrared photons to visible using a quantum structure based on an InAs wetting layer (WL) embedded in AlGaAs grown by molecular beam epitaxy. The grown structures are characterized by photoluminescence, and it is found that the upconversion center is a real intermediate state induced by the WL. The temperature dependence suggests that the intermediate state is of an exciton nature, which is supported by the result of an eight-band k · p calculation.